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In President Trump’s reckoning, international trade is a zero-sum game with distinct winners and losers. Exports are Team America’s points. Imports are the foreign team’s points. The trade account is the scoreboard, and the deficit on that scoreboard proves that the home team is losing at trade. Accordingly, the president considers blocking imports and promoting exports to be integral to effective trade policymaking.

2018 likely will be remembered for achieving solid economic growth, a highly volatile stock market, and an emerging trade war with China. In 2019 we can expect slower growth, continued volatility, and China to resist significant market-based reforms. These and other factors, combined with an environment of political uncertainty, could create greater risks.

The U.S. economy is estimated to grow by 3.1 percent this year, according to the Federal Reserve’s median rate, followed by 2.5 percent next year and 2 percent in 2020. The Wall Street Journal’s Economic Forecasting Survey of more than 60 economists indicates very similar projections.

It seems so long ago now, but towards the end of the Obama administration, government officials from the United States and China were working diligently to try to conclude a bilateral investment treaty (BIT). There was some uncertainty about whether the two governments would reach an agreement, as well as whether the U.S. Congress would ratify the treaty, but nevertheless, these two leading economic powers were working together towards a joint vision in an important area of global economic governance.

Trade casualties are mounting in both the United States and abroad as President Trump’s tariffs against imports from China, as well as from our allies, begin to be felt. Earlier we reported that U.S. steel producing industries, which employ approximately 140,000 workers, likely would benefit at the expense of the much greater U.S. steel-using industries, which employ 5.5 to 6.5 million U.S. workers. But recent reports indicate that even these U.S. steel producers are experiencing new difficulties as a result of the tariffs.

President Donald Trump shocked foreign policy professionals during his presidential campaign when he stated that he was willing to talk to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Earlier this year, he took up Kim’s surprise summit offer, resulting in the foreign policy shocker of the year.

Donald Trump was not the first U.S. presidential candidate to blame foreigners and their trade practices for America’s real and imagined economic woes. That is a time-honored tradition of U.S. electoral politics. But Trump is the first president — at least since Congress began delegating parts of its trade policymaking authority to the executive branch a century ago — to actually believe that protectionism will make America great. That alone makes trade war likely. Add a heaping sense of nationalist grievance and trade war appears imminent.

President Trump’s recent decision to impose tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum was met with Chinese tariffs on U.S. products and agricultural goods. In turn, this has escalated with each country identifying additional barriers to trade. To prevent a damaging trade war, and for our mutual long-term benefit, the United States and China need to negotiate a free trade agreement.

If you listen to the administration today you would think America was a small, virtually defenseless country threatened by a gaggle of hostile great powers. The latest national-security crisis involves the vast, globe-spanning empire of North Korea. Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats declared on NBC that the North “has become a potential existential threat to the United States.” He apparently sees Pyongyang’s armored divisions, aircraft carriers, air wings and nuclear-tipped missiles encircling the beleaguered United States.

Trade frictions are nothing new to the U.S.-China relationship. Over the years they’ve ebbed and flowed, but were managed with enough deft to avoid major meltdowns. That seems likely to change under President Donald Trump, an economic nationalist who sees trade as a zero-sum game and the United States emerging “the winner” of a trade war with China.